Near the end of “Love Game: A History of Tennis, From Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon,” Elizabeth Wilson expresses the hope that tennis might once again become “airier and less muscle-bound” and “recover its true self as that mixture of chess and dance, of intellectual geometry and aesthetic joy.” It’s clear that she’s wishing for some reincarnation of Roger Federer — perhaps Roger Federer reincarnating an earlier self — to supplant the most recent dominant styles: the muscular bullying of Rafael Nadal and the Gumby-bodied determinism of Novak Djokovic.

... For all contemporary tennis fans, the Platonic ideal of Federer hovers over the game, and for contemporary writers who choose tennis as their subject, the top-seeded David Foster Wallace awaits in their bracket. As different as these three books are, they all genuflect to both Federer and Wallace, and they all to varying degrees try to do what Wallace did: By applying a wide-ranging and incisive intelligence to what is really only a game, they hope to make their work significant, universal — not “just” about sports. Unfortunately, these books have the bad luck to be competing with Wallace’s own "String Theory” (Library of America, $19.95), a just-released collection of five nonfiction pieces he wrote for various publications, including Tennis magazine, where I edited him (not much).